The Mirage Of Playlisting - Enter Spotify’s Hit Making Machine
we tried to break down into Spotify's playlists algorithms, just to find out it's actually you who can breakthrough
Gone are the days when you spent countless hours searching and downloading music from shady websites, then stuff your iPod to have it on the go. Now every beat of music you could ever imagine is literally at your fingertips, wherever you have an internet connection. The music world is now dominated by almighty music streaming services, with Spotify dwarfing its competitors with a wooping 113 million paid subscribers.
How does this feel for an artist trying to reach his fanbase? Like a dreamland, of course: in theory, all you have to do is upload your songs to any / all these DSPs’ and let the internet do its magic, making your studio efforts available for hundreds of millions. That’s in theory, as the reality is strikingly different. Your music is fighting for fans’ attention with another 40,000 daily uploads to Spotify alone. That’s 1.2 million per month, while the year count looks a lot scarier.
So, how do you, as an artist, stand a chance with gathering a decent number of streams within the Spotify music jungle? Enter the Swedish giant’s artificial intelligence, that uses complex auto evolving algorithms to tap into its users’ listening habits and adapt the recommendations and auto generated playlists accordingly. And playlists are the place where the Spotify magic happens when it comes to nurturing a hit out of nothing. A key differentiator compared to Apple Music, Spotify playlists contributed to the platform’s success, as it gave the users the options of creating selections and make them publicly available, gaining followers and listeners. Aside from the ego inflating result of having more and more followers, the user playlists pass a lot of information to the machine learning systems, teaching Spotify what songs have the potential of blossoming into worldwide hits. Is this enough for your song to get the recognition you desire? Apparently not.
How do Spotify playlists algorithms work?
Spotify algorithms are constantly digging for new music to recommend, and also to populate selections like Today’s Top Hits or Discover Weekly. And because the Spotify owned playlists have tens of millions of followers, these are the places where 99.9% of the breakthroughs are happening. Good, now we’re going somewhere. Spotify logs user listening data, match similar user preferences and scans tens of millions of music related webpages daily, just to be sure they hit your musical taste sweetspot. And they will.
So, user generated playlists and music blogs coverage: will these bring you the much needed Spotify exposure? Yes and no. While a consistent presence into playlists and blogs would get you closer to fire up the algorithm, there’s the human touch also: teams of music curators maintain Spotify’s editorial playlists, backed up by the powerful data mining AI: how many seconds was a track streamed, for how many times it was played and playlisted, what are the locations it gets most plays from a.s.o. The song keeps climbing this virtual popularity ladder, with little but really important human aid: it gets tested on different levels until it might reach the highest possible ranking in Spotify’s algorithm. Yes, the Today’s Top Hits, followed by no less than 25 million people.
A quickstart guide to entering Spotify’s editorial playlists
Now, the most important question: how to get there? Obviously, this requires patience and perseverence to take it from the ground level up. There are a few keypoints we identified, elements that could help you get the number of streams you’ve been dreaming:
— create a coeherent artist image and stay true to it.
— build a loyal fanbase to give plays to your songs or playlist your track
— find the right record label that could promote the music towards extremely well targeted media outlets and playlisters. This is where Soundfeed might get extremely useful
— use the Fans Also Like tab on your artist Spotify page, check on what playlists are these artists featured on and try contacting these playlists to pitch your music.
Start by digging for the right partners, stay active on the social media channels and, yes, produce good music :)
Stay tuned. We're working on some preety cool Soundfeed style features to help with that.